Visual arts encompass diverse forms like painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography, utilizing various mediums and techniques to convey ideas and emotions through visual elements like color, line, and texture. From traditional practices like printmaking to contemporary mediums such as digital art and installation, artists explore cultural, social, and personal themes. Film and performance art blur boundaries between visual and performing arts, while digital technology enables new modes of artistic expression. Through experimentation and innovation, visual arts continue to evolve, offering immersive experiences and challenging perceptions while reflecting the complexities of human experience in diverse cultural contexts.
Visual Arts Quotes
1. “Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.”
— Julia Morgan
2. “Be drawn to the visual arts for it can expand your imagination.”
— Barbara Januszkiewicz
3. “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
— Thomas Merton
4. “Art is humanity’s most essential, most universal language. It is not a frill, but a necessary part of communication. The quality of civilization can be measured through its music, dance, drama, architecture, visual art and literature. We must give our children knowledge and understanding of civilization’s most profound works.”
— Ernest L. Boyer
5. “Our one goal is to give the world a taste of peace, friendship and understanding. Through the visual arts, the art of celebration of life.”
— Steven Spielberg
6. “There is no must in art because art is free.”
— Wassily Kandinsky
7. “Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.”
— Edgar Degas
8. “I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.”
— Joan Miro
9. “There are three forms of visual art: Painting is art to look at, sculpture is art you can walk around, and architecture is art you can walk through.”
— Dan Rice
10. “In visual art it’s better once to see, than one hundred times to hear.”
— Igor Babailov
11. “Art is the triumph over chaos.”
— John Cheever
12. “It’s the same with visual arts, you have some really cool, wonderful striking images that make you think and then again you have wonderful striking images that just take you away from the existing world for a second. And I like the latter a bit more.”
— Ville Valo
13. “Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?”
— Paul Gauguin
14. “Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.”
— Gilbert K. Chesterton
15. “Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.”
— Henri Matisse
16. “I like visual arts, and what I love doing is participating in the making of it.”
— Sonia Braga
17. “A picture book is a small door to the enormous world of the visual arts, and they’re often the first art a young person sees.”
— Tomie dePaola
18. “The visual arts must communicate to the human spirit, forcing individuals to reflect on themselves and their existence beyond their own self-interest.”
— Dean Mitchell
19. “Creating music, visual art, producing music and film are always at the forefront of my life. Everything great that has come into my life has been through channeling and manifestation of a vision or dream. Pure passion equals love.”
— Matt Sorum
20. “God’s careful instructions for building the tabernacle in Exodus 31 remind us that his perfection sets the standard for whatever we create in his name. Whatever we happen to make-not only in the visual arts, but in all the arts-we should make it as well as we can, offering God our very best.”
— Philip Graham Ryken
21. “A community united by the ideals of compassion and creativity has incredible power. Art of all kinds—music, literature, traditional arts, visual arts—can lift a community.”
— Martin O’Malley
22. “I found that it wasn’t so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they’re kindred spirits.”
— J. Carter Brown
23. “Evidently the arts, all the visual arts, are becoming more democratic in the worst sense of the word.”
— Eugenio Montale
24. “I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.”
— David Bowie
25. “I’d have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn’t been able to shift into fiction.”
— Jonathan Lethem
26. “Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.”
— Yahoo Serious
27. “At the School of Visual Arts in New York, you can get your degree in Net art, which is really a fantastic way of thinking of theater in new ways.”
— Laurie Anderson
28. “At the age of 80, I’m becoming a visual artist. This could be my rebirth.”
— Harry Seidler
29. “If I want to do something in the TV industry, I should be allowed to explore that, but not in a way where it has to cancel out or ruin my visual art career.”
— Kalup Linzy
30. “The primary purpose of the Museum is to help people enjoy, understand, and use the visual arts of our time.”
— Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
31. “Khairani Barokka is a writer, spoken-word poet, visual artist and performer whose work has a strong vein of activism, particularly around disability, but also how this intersects with, for example, issues of gender – she’s campaigned for reproductive rights in her native Indonesian, and is currently studying for a PhD in disability and visual cultures at Goldsmiths. She’s written a feminist, environmentalist, anti-colonialist narrative poem, with tactile artwork and a Braille translation. How could I not publish that?”
— Deborah Smith
32. “Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character – even its films, it’s argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.”
— Will Self
33. “The art that I make and that I see others make confirms the miracle of being alive. Almost every day I live in a state of exaltation. The art of painting is to me sacred. It is central to all the other visual arts. This art is in a constant state of renewal.”
— Joseph Plaskett
34. “All the arts, music, the visual arts, acting and dancing arts, cooking arts, and I believe sports, will save the human race because they can leap over barriers, religions, leap over barriers of race, politics.”
— Pete Seeger
35. “I just see in pop culture, music, visual art, books, etc., a real hunger for the new and different, and I think that’s amazing. Satisfying this hunger is part of the responsibility of a creative person.”
— Porochista Khakpour
36. “The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso.”
— Joseph Campbell
37. “To me, as a visual artist, I don’t want to get into the theory of Buddhism. There are many Buddhism theories and they fight each other, like Christians as well.”
— Hiroshi Sugimoto
38. “Photography is the art of anticipation, not working with memories, but showing their formation. As such, it has relentlessly usurped imaginative and critical prerogatives of older, slower literature and handmade visual art.”
— Peter Schjeldahl
39. “I’m very interested in the materiality of language. I wonder if, perhaps, this comes from my background in the visual arts. I was a potter for a number of years and earned a BFA in art before going to graduate school for creative writing.”
— Anna Journey
40. “I have so much music that I do. Just like how a visual artist is always sketching something but they might not share it, I’m always writing songs or coming up with melodic lines on piano or guitar. It’s therapy. It’s always happening.”
— Erykah Badu
41. “I don’t think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a matter of corroboration. The visual arts, from Manet onwards, seemed far more open to change and experiment than the novel, though that’s only partly the fault of the writers. There’s something about the novel that resists innovation.”
— J. G. Ballard
42. “It’s as though aesthetic value, quality, could be preserved only by concentrating on ‘absolute’ or ‘autonomous’ art: thus on visual art… that held and moved and stirred the beholder as sheer decoration could not.”
— Clement Greenberg
43. “Symphony is the ability to see the big picture, connect the dots, combine disparate things into something new. Visual artists in particular are good at seeing how the pieces come together. I experienced this myself by trying to learn to draw.”
— Daniel H. Pink
44. “I started connecting things to my body during my childhood. I approached the computer as a mediating element, as a form of visual art.”
— Steve Mann
45. “Unlike a lot of choreographers, I don’t always start with the music. I often start with a visual artist, and then find music that fits the world of that visual artist.”
— Wayne McGregor
46. “I’m quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.”
— Richard Dawkins
47. “I often envy my friends who are visual artists. Visual artists have other things to work with. Other media. I envy my sculptor friends: they have hunks of matter. Marble. Wood. It’s physical, which I find very appealing. What we have is nothing, is just glaringly blank.”
— Dani Shapiro
48. “What draws me to theater and religion are these rituals made to make you feel emotion. It’s so banal in an interesting way. In visual art it’s about making you feel emotional, but it’s more subtle.”
— Ragnar Kjartansson
49. “I went to an arts school as a kid. We had to take dance every other day, along with drama, music and visual arts. However, wearing black tights was something I dreaded… and still have nightmares about it to this day. I think I was a pretty good dancer. I suppose that training helped me land parts in musicals… or has just given me nightmares!”
— Jake Epstein
50. “Thai society rarely attempts to control literature in the same way that it vigilantly polices visual art. It’s ironic because people in this society are more aware of literature than they are of art.”
— Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
